A Study On The Functions Of Teachers' Moves In Middle School English Classroom Discourse

Teacher talk plays an important role in school education and classroom teaching and related research has been receiving much attention from scholars at home and abroad.As the basic unit of classroom discourse,teachers' moves are keys to developing and supporting interactions in classrooms.Therefore,middle school English teachers and researchers should pay more attention to the moves of the classroom discourse,which will return to the interactivity of language teaching and build productive classroom moves to optimize the English teachers' development from the micro level.However,there is rare research that focuses on the moves of classroom discourse,especially for the teachers' moves in junior middle school English classroom.Based on the Zheng Xinmin's(2019)middle school English teachers' moves framework and Van de pol's(2010)framework,this study will analyze the moves of middle English teachers from the perspective of Vygotsky's ZPD theory and scaffolding theory,aiming at understanding the types and the functions of middle school English teachers' moves.This paper will answer the following three research questions: l.What moves are employed by middle school English teachers? 2.What functions do the middle school English teachers' moves have in students' English learning? 3.What are the problems of middle school English teachers' moves?The video-taping was used as research instruments to answer theresearch questions.The research subjects of this study are four middle school English teachers,all of whom are come from the Experimental middle school in Hohhot.After that,the video lessons were transcribed and analyzed in detail.The results show that: Firstly,eight types of teacher's moves are distinguished in English classes,including adding on,repeating,revoicing,exampling,questioning,telling,evaluating and extending.Among them,questioning and evaluating are used most frequently and extending the least.Secondly,teachers' moves effects positively on students in four aspects,containing: supporting students' meta-cognitive development;supporting students' cognitive development;supporting students' affective development;supporting students' language development.Thirdly,the author finds that there are still some problems of junior middle school English teachers' moves in terms of authenticity,logicality and normality.Finally,the researcher put forward some suggestions that may help middle school English teachers use proper moves in teaching process according to the results of the research.Then limitations of this study and suggestions were given for future study.